With his dying father unable to leave the house and follow the butterfly cycle for the first time since he was a child, Ben Masters endeavors to become his connection to the outdoors and his treasured butterflies, reporting back with stories of beloved species and with stories of the woods and meadows that are their habitats and once were his. Structured around a series of exchanges and remembrances, butterflies become a way of talking about masculinity, memory, generational differences, and ultimately loss and continuation. Masters takes readers on an unlikely journey where Luther Vandross and The Sopranos rub shoulders with the likes of Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf on butterflies and gender; the metamorphoses of Prince; Zadie Smith on Joni Mitchell and how sensibilities evolve; and the lives and works of Vladimir Nabokov and other literary lepidopterists.
A Russian arrives in Singapore with a secret to sell. When the Russian is killed and Sam Joseph, the CIA officer dispatched for the meet, goes missing, operational chief Artemis Procter is made a scapegoat for the disaster and run out of the service. Months later, Sam appears at Procter’s doorstep with an explosive secret: there is a Russian mole burrowed deep within the highest ranks of the CIA. As Procter and Sam investigate, they arrive at a shortlist of suspects made up of Procter’s closest friends and fiercest enemies. The hunt requires Procter to dredge up her checkered past in the service of the CIA, placing the pair in the sights of a savvy Russian spymaster who will protect Moscow’s mole in Langley at all costs.
Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her 19-year-old daughter, Erin, is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name but insists she is someone named Nyx. Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind or the effects of an ancient curse.
Christmas is not an easy time to sell a house, but in Boston tycoon John Bragdon, Cabot Cove Realtor Eve Simpson has found a buyer for the old Jarvis homestead. Unfortunately, Eve gets a lump of coal in her stocking in the form of Kenny Jarvis, who has been missing for years and presumed dead but has now come back to stop his sister from selling their childhood home. Eve presses on, organizing a welcome dinner for Bragdon and his wife, Rose Marie, to meet the leading citizens of the town, including Jessica Fletcher. Dinner is interrupted by an uninvited guest --- not Santa but Kenny, who threateningly promises Rose Marie she will never live in his house. When Rose Marie is found dead a few days later, Kenny is the natural suspect. But Jessica isn′t so sure he′s on the naughty list.
It's been five years since Charlotte Donovan was ditched at the altar by her ex-fiancée. She now has her strings ensemble, the Rosalind Quartet, and her life in New York is a dream come true. As the holidays draw near, her ensemble mate Sloane persuades Charlotte and the rest of the quartet to spend Christmas with her family in Colorado. But when Charlotte arrives, she discovers that Sloane’s sister, Adele, also brought a friend home --- and that friend is none other than her ex, Brighton. Brighton just wanted to try to forget that her band kicked her out. But instead, she’s stuck pretending like she and her ex are strangers --- which proves to be difficult when Sloane and Adele’s mom signs them all up for a series of Christmas dating events. After a few days, however, things start to slip through. Memories. Music. The way they used to play together. And it all feels painfully familiar.
Tucked away down a Kyoto backstreet lies the extraordinary Kamogawa Diner, run by Chef Nagare and his daughter, Koishi. The father-daughter duo have reinvented themselves as “food detectives,” offering a service that goes beyond cooking mouth-watering meals. Through their culinary sleuthing, they revive lost recipes and rekindle forgotten memories. From the Olympic swimmer who misses his estranged father’s bento lunchbox to the one-hit-wonder pop star who remembers the tempura she ate to celebrate her only successful record, each customer leaves the diner forever changed --- though not always in the ways they expect. The Kamogawa Diner doesn’t just serve meals. It’s a door to the past through the miracle of delicious food.
SONNY BOY is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the great roles, the essential collaborations and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels. The book’s golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose. Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions --- the same lights that shine bright can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love. That has made all the difference.
For several days, a strange and bright new star in the sky above Norway has sown an unyielding sense of foreboding, agitation and fear. Tove, a painter on holiday with her family, has spiraled into a psychosis that stirs her into a flurry of unbridled creativity. Geir, a policeman who has been investigating a grisly triple murder, comes to a sinister revelation he must keep to himself. Nineteen-year-old Line falls in love with the lead singer of a metal band and is lured into a secret and frightening world. But most bewildering, and disquieting, is the discovery made by Syvert, an undertaker. Since the star has appeared, no one has died. In THE THIRD REALM, Karl Ove Knausgaard returns to the spellbinding world of THE MORNING STAR and THE WOLVES OF ETERNITY, as a cast of new and familiar characters continue to reckon with the meaning of this star. What is haunting them, and why?
It is the Year of the Wood Dragon, and the ingenious Mike Brink has been invited to Tokyo, Japan, to open the legendary Dragon Box. The box was constructed during one of Japan’s most tumultuous periods, when the samurai class was disbanded and the shogun lost power. In this moment of crisis, Emperor Meiji locked a priceless Imperial secret in the Dragon Box. Only two people knew how to open the box --- Meiji and the box’s sadistic constructor --- and both died without telling a soul what was inside or how to open it. Every 12 years since then, in the Year of the Dragon, the Imperial family holds a clandestine contest to open the box. Every puzzle master who has attempted to open it has died in the process. But Brink is not just any puzzle master. He may be the only person alive who can crack it.
In 2022, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help finally finish her long-gestating memoir. A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring and complicated woman whom Riley Keough loved and now grieved. Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, lay in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story. She knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these memories, incandescent and painful, to the world. To make her mother known. FROM HERE TO THE GREAT UNKNOWN is written in both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices, a mother and daughter communicating --- from this world to the one beyond --- as they try to heal each other.
We have listed 12 of Carol’s Bookreporter.com Bets On picks that are now or soon to be in paperback. Which of these books have you read or do you plan to read? Please check all that apply.
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Coming Soon
Curious about what books will be released in the months ahead so you can pre-order or reserve them? Then click on the months below.
January's Books on Screen roundup includes the films People We Meet on Vacation on Netflix and H Is for Hawk in theaters; the series premieres of "Harlan Coben's Run Away," "His & Hers" and "Agatha Christie’s Sevel Dials" on Netflix, along with "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" on HBO Max; the season premieres of ABC's "Will Trent," Hallmark Channel's "When Calls the Heart," Netflix's "Bridgerton," Prime Video's "The Night Manager" and Hulu's "Tell Me Lies"; the season finales of "Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale" on AMC+ and "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" on Disney+ and Hulu; and the DVD/Blu-ray releases of Wicked: For Good, One Battle After Another and Afterburn.